I have an issue with DHCP on the W2K Professional part of my development box. It currently has a great deal of difficulty getting addresses, and consequently using the Internet is pretty inconvenient. I don't think it is the network or the DHCP server, since both FreeBSD and the Window 7 RC work just fine (it triple-boots). Otherwise the computer works as it should.

I'm not much of a Windows user, so I've no idea how to diagnose this. The various network settings are correct, and have not changed. I use a hard address at the router, and this has not changed. It would seem that either I picked up a bad sector or there is some software cause, like a registry error. One day it just did not work as it did before.

Multiple virus scans using the on-line version of Trend and Norton come up clean, as does an Adaware scan (though this is not an adware issue).

I can rebuild and pull things off a backup, but I'd rather fix this if I can.

It gets an address sometimes, connects for a while, and then loses its connection. That repeats. I have it set up to do DHCP with a static address assigned at the router (the DHCP server). That worked before.

The point is that it has worked this way for many years. Then one day it started doing this in W2K, but not anything else. So, to me, it seems that either the information changed on the disk (bad sector) or something on the disk changed (registry? corrupted file? dunno).